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He wants to grow old with John, spend the Sunday mornings together in the bathtub and let John wash his hair.
It’s always like this. John facing the tiny bathroom window so he can enjoy the warmth and light if it’s sunny or the rain and wind if there’s a storm.
Today, it’s grey, white and blurry. They’re practically snowed in, the whole of 221 is silent, even the rats in flat C (Sherlock hopes they found the food he hid. Mrs Hudson threw a fit when she found out and forbade him of ever doing it again. So he stole the key to the flat and has now named one of the vermin John.), even Mrs Hudson, who is out of town seeing her sister. The roads are empty, lights are on in every house, the only sound in 221B the gentle drip-drip of the tab in the bathroom and the silent plump-plump of the droplet hitting the bathwater.
“Seal.”
John is comfortable and warm, heels lifted on the edge of the tub, Sherlock’s fingers absently rubbing his thigh. The phantom ache is there today more than it has been in months. Must be the weather. It’s dark and dreary and cold and instead of letting it get into your head like the rest of London, John gets it into his leg.
“Pole.”
Sherlock rub-rub-rubs John’s flesh a bit higher up, where it really aches. John grunts, buries his face into the water, bubbles rising to the surface. Sherlock continues with the homonyms.
“Sink.”
“Bllb-plrp,” says John.
“I haven’t,” Sherlock kneads the muscle forcefully as John resurfaces and sprays water at his face.
“Did too. Two weeks ago. We actually had a weather then.”
“Quiet. Spring,” Sherlock’s fingers go to the edge of the tub to reach for the soap.
“Don’t remind me,” John grunts. “Too far away.”
Sherlock lathers a sponge and prods and pokes John until he turns around and allows the hands to start massaging his back.
+
It’s November and snowing and cold. Whole of London is in a chaos, everyone who has not prepared for the inevitable after seeing the first snowflake floating down gently sometime in mid-October is busy trying to keep themselves warm in their autumn coats, trying not to crash into anything and everything without snow chains on their tires and everyone, everyone is complaining. Even the weather lady on the news who usually assumes such a cheery constitution that she could thaw the ice covering the Thames now appears in front of the weather maps with a scowl, looking like she would very much like to throw her mic at the camera man and be off to somewhere warm.
Everyone complains. Except Sherlock and John.
For two weeks now, they have been shut inside the flat, heat turned off from everywhere except the kitchen, the sitting room and the bathroom. The kitchen cupboards are full of tins, a fire blazes in the fireplace through the night and every evening they camp out in front of it on a queen-sized mattress with every blanket of the house wrapped around them and two fluffy pillows under their heads.
They take long baths, drink excessive amounts of tea and sink deeper and deeper into hibernation while the snow keeps piling up behind the windows. Sherlock keeps himself entertained with a box full of cold cases and texts Lestrade (who has to go to the office, snow or no snow) when he solves them and needs someone arrested. John helps him when he can and snoozes on the sofa, in his chair, on the floor while Sherlock chatters away and taps rhythms of violin concertos on John’s back to keep himself from reaching his fingers towards one of his secret hiding places.
Nicotine patches are the one thing they have forgotten to buy.
Whenever it stops snowing for a moment and the ploughs have cleared the sidewalks before the next heavy snowfall deems their job worthless, John steps into his boots and is off to buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the grim sunlight.
“Nicotine patches!” Sherlock bellows from the window and gets a faceful of snow from one of the neighbourhood children who have just been waiting for a pause in the weather to throw snowballs at the windows.
John returns with potatoes, carrots, a cabbage head, oranges, apples and a mysterious small box that never finds its way to their fridge but is deposited at Mrs Hudson’s before John climbs upstairs with the rest of the groceries and goes to the sitting room to dangle a carrot in front of Sherlock’s nose.
John doesn’t want to force Sherlock to eat. After the initial shock of seeing his non-existent eating habits and worry over his health, he was reminded of several young girls who had come to see him on a completely weight-unrelated issue but with each of which he had ended up talking about the situation, proposed them to seek help, but never forced food or phone numbers of psychiatrists on them. Food with them was something they didn’t know how to cope with and though the signs were clear to him, they themselves did not see it or were not ready to admit they had a problem.
It is not the same with Sherlock. He simply deems eating unnecessary, sometimes even distasteful and nauseating, and John understands that. People react to things in different ways.
But when he sees Sherlock is hungry, when he is absolutely certain he is about to faint from lack of nutrition, he will try and get him to eat.
It is easier when you tell him not to. It’s like telling a child they are not supposed to put their hand on a hot stove; deny Sherlock food, especially something he really likes, and he’ll eat his weight’s worth purely out of spite.
Thus far, John has tested the hypothesis with muffins (three of the softest, fruitiest ones he could find from Tesco), sandwiches with pickle and cheese, box of strawberries and a small herring cooked with potatoes and carrots. All was gone in moments, the only things left the paper muffin tins, crumbs, plastic wrapping and the bones.
This time it’s blueberry pie, fresh from Mrs Hudson’s oven.
John sets the pie down on the kitchen table, Sherlock lurking behind him with a suspicious look that says he knows something unfortunate is coming his way. He has wrapped himself in three dressing gowns and holds his arms like they can’t quite reach his sides.
“I’m going to take a shower,” John says over his shoulder on his way to the bathroom. “Do not eat that.”
Sherlock is on his third serving of the pie when John emerges. His face is black with blueberry and he looks almost guilty, as if not being discreet and at least trying to hide the evidence of his crime is worse than committing it in the first place.
All in all, he looks like a 5-year-old caught with his hand stuck in the jar of biscuits.
John can’t help it. He laughs.
Through the tears, he picks up the kitchen towel, wets it and goes to the table to wipe Sherlock’s face clean. Sherlock squirms like a child who is having his face cleaned after a particularly juicy meal that has stuck to his face and that he wants to stay there.
They have tea and pie and after Sherlock falls asleep on the rug with his coat over his three dressing gowns, John sneaks downstairs to Mrs Hudson’s with a tiny bottle of single malt he keeps a supply of on the top cupboard and which Sherlock never touches.
+
The snowfall picks up its pace for a week and then calms down once again. Mrs Hudson takes her chance and flies away again, this time to Costa del Sol with a big sunhat on her head and Sherlock and John waving after the plane until it disappears into the distance.
Sherlock stares at the thermometre for a day when he has absolutely nothing else to do and writes down the temperature every hour by the hour. John brings him tea to where he is sitting on the windowsill, even wraps a scarf round his neck and another round his toes when he sees the quicksilver in the thermometre sink even lower.
When he offers Sherlock a jumper (the only clean one, bright red with a moose on it), Sherlock sticks out his tongue at it.
“God forbid you’d catch pneumonia from sitting there like a crow,” John sighs and lets the matter rest.
“Threatening me with non-existent entities will not help your case,” Sherlock mutters and writes down the twelve o’clock temperature.
John glances at him from the door over the basket of dirty laundry in his arms.
He asks about it at dinner because, well, he is curious. And they’ve never talked about it before.
“You don’t believe in God then?”
“Of course not!” Sherlock says between mouthfuls of potatoes.
He stops for a moment.
“You do?”
“I guess it’s comforting, to know that there is someone there looking after me,” John shrugs his shoulders.
“Your words on the battlefield mean nothing.”
“What…?”
Oh. Please, God, let me live.
“They are only something people say when they have no one else to turn to. Meaningless, hypocritical phrases from hypocritical people that only turn to the deity as a last resort,” Sherlock spits out, grabs the spoon from the bowl and stacks more potatoes on his plate. He squishes them with his fork, squeezes in ketchup and mustard and begins to stuff himself.
“I admit I didn’t really think those words as an act of faith at the time, more as a reflexive response to the situation, but ---“
“Hypocrisy,” Sherlock bares his teeth, mouth full of potato.
John sighs.
+
“You seem like the kind of guy who reads Austen on the toilet, you know.”
Sherlock bristles like a peacock inside his 500 quid pure silk dressing gown and lifts his pinkie up as he pours the tea down his throat.
“You are so posh with some things and such a plebeian with others,” (Sherlock’s eyebrows shoot up at the term), “but I’m a layman, I’m boring, I’m ordinary, so can I please watch my James Bond without you sniffing and yawning at my shoulder?”
Sherlock breathes out the air he has just dragged in with a long derisive sound.
“Go to your box,” John suggests, laying his head against his palm and watches Sean Connery sweet-talking to a car while his current girl is standing behind him looking like Sherlock does at the moment.
They are both sparkling clean from the bath, warm and content, and in a moment of weakness John has suggested they watch one of his favourite Bonds. He has to remind himself once again that however amenable he seems while he is washing John’s hair and with a cup of tea in his hands afterwards, Sherlock is adamant in his opinion on action films.
“Solved it all.”
“Then I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive the whole winter with you.”
Outside the storm keeps howling like a lost soul.
+
So the experiments must be begun, and Sherlock perks up and starts to smile again. After all, his black moods only take about a week at a time and by now he is well into his hibernating stage so it only takes a couple of days of huffing and puffing and biting at John’s ankles after the row they had when Sherlock (insulted both by John’s bad taste in films and by his words on the sofa) threw all of John’s action films out of the window before he is dressed in his lab coat and goggles with a blow torch in hand and happy.
John stays in the kitchen as well, keeping him company, even though Sherlock clearly barely registers his presence when there is something interesting on the slide under the microscope or when he manages to set his tea on fire.
On a Wednesday, John wakes up without Sherlock next to him on the mattress, trots into the kitchen to have a cup of tea and an apple. All of a sudden he has a huge craving for apples. And he knows there’s some in the bowl on the kitchen table.
There’s one left and it has a note taped to it:
John, do NOT eat this! I injected it with mad cow’s decease and it’s the last of the patch. Do NOT eat it!
Evidently, Sherlock is more concerned about losing mad cow’s apples than John’s well-being. He doesn’t want to know what happened to the rest of the patch.
So he takes advantage of the weather that has clearly enticed Sherlock to go out as well and takes a trip to the market to pick up some uncontaminated apples, flour and butter. He returns home and makes them into a pie, invites Mrs Hudson who has just come back from her travels over for tea but is left with only a small slice of the pie when he returns with his guest and finds Sherlock curled on the sofa, moaning quietly and holding his stomach.
On another day, a Sunday, John sits in his chair and Sherlock walks past him on his way to the bathroom wearing a pair of wellies, a raincoat, a sou’wester, rubber gloves and carrying a car battery and goggles.
“Do I want to know?” John asks, eyes never leaving the telly.
“Probably not,” Sherlock answers, adjusting the goggles on his face.
“You could always have gone to the nearest sex shop and gotten a full-body rubber suit. Would be easier to move around.”
“Moving in a full-body latex uniform is not easy,” Sherlock says from the hall.
“Please don’t tell me how you know that.”
+
December arrives. Christmas lights appear in the windows across the street and they can smell the delicious aromas of Mrs Hudson’s cooking drifting upstairs every morning. Their visits downstairs become more of an excuse to sniff at the smell of rum cake, nibble on biscuits, try different patches of mustard that make their eyes water and gorge themselves on toasts with exotic chutneys on them. Mrs Hudson cooks, John sits and eats and Sherlock picks at his food, suddenly very still and quiet, back in the darkness inside his skull. They return upstairs, slowly, enjoying the warmth of home and fullness of their bellies.
Or John does. Sherlock sits in front of the fire and stares at the orange and red flames for hours without saying a word.
On the 16th, a rap on the door at an early hour of the morning forces John’s eyes open but Sherlock is already up, whispering at someone at the door (John hears the slow dragging sound of a slightly pleading voice), pulling on his coat and closing the door behind himself.
He disappears for a day but when he comes back he is his normal self again and falls asleep in John’s chair with his legs dangling over one side and with a half-finished cup of tea balancing on the arm rest. John moves quietly round the flat for the rest of the day and every time he walks past the chair where Sherlock’s ankles are peaking from under the blanket he lowers his palm on the bare skin lightly before moving away.
He wants to understand these changes in Sherlock’s moods but they arrive so suddenly, without warning and Sherlock never mentions them himself afterwards. For now, John just lets them be, like the subject about God. He doesn’t want to pester Sherlock when he is lost somewhere in the dark corners of his mind where John can never seem to reach him.
+
Sherlock has secrets, John knows. He doesn’t tell him everything, of course, but the actual secrets are few and which existence Sherlock does not even acknowledge. He moves around them, pretends they are not there, digs out every single one of John’s with a glance but never allows him to come close to where the potential secrets of his past hang above him and around him like storm clouds.
John tries to ignore it but every time Sherlock shuts himself away, even when he is in the same room, he feels a sting of anger he never usually feels because of him. He keeps a lid on it as best as he can, only failing once when Sherlock crawls under the blankets on his side of the mattress at early dawn, having hovered around the flat like a ghost the whole day, disappeared into cold rooms, avoiding John every way he can.
“Where did you go?” John asks, half-asleep. He doesn’t actually mean Sherlock’s physical disappearance, why he hides himself away. He wants to know where Sherlock has gone inside his head, why he is not telling him anything.
Sherlock turns his back to him and pretends to fall asleep.
+
It keeps snowing through Christmas and New Year. Sherlock’s birthday comes and goes with a new Bunsen burner from John and Mrs Hudson and a solemn promise from Mycroft not to darken their doorstep for two weeks. The snow falls steadily down, giving everything a nice soft fullness. Because of the thick clouds, the sun has no chance to shine on the snow and make everything blindingly white and so the darkness persists and makes it seem like they are living in a cave.
They take longer baths, they drink more tea, they go down every morning to make sure Mrs Hudson has everything she needs and keeps warm enough, they sit in front of the fire every night and drink rum and eat Mrs Hudson’s biscuits.
The first peak of sun brings with it Mycroft, clad in a ridiculous fur hat and clutching his umbrella as usual. John, worried that they might be getting more snow, has gone off to do the necessary grocery shopping now that the weather has temporarily changed and so Sherlock does not need to act nice or even pretend to be polite.
Mycroft sits in John’s chair, legs crossed, stares at him with the contempt of an older brother who is about to scold his little brother for acting stupidly in public.
“Was it such a chore?” Mycroft asks him.
“Fuck off,” Sherlock snarls.
“Better you go once a year than never at all.”
“Fuck. Off,” Sherlock repeats.
Mycroft’s mouth twists slightly, he fingers the umbrella next to his chair before crossing his hands on his lap.
“Are you taking care of yourself?”
Sherlock’s nostrils flare and he jumps up from the chair, tripping on the mattress he has not bothered to clear away before they have sat down. The mattress is like a barrier between the two chairs, a border of comfort protecting Sherlock from his brother’s meddling. The imprint of John’s body is clear on his side of the mattress, the leg of his pyjama trousers peaking under the pillow.
He’d be wearing them now if he was home.
“Out,” Sherlock orders.
“I’m trying to help you, Sherlock ---“
“You lost the right to help when you blabbed to mother behind my back!”
Mycroft gets up as well, eyes dark and cheeks red.
“What was I supposed to do? Tell her that her son tried to commit suicide because she doesn’t love him?”
There is a clutter of tin cans hitting the floorboards. John stands at the top of the stairs, looking like he has just come home to find the whole of his house gone and all the occupants with it.
+
“Why don’t you talk to me?”
Sherlock has chased Mycroft out with a snarl and for once he has had the decency to walk fast when needed. A whiff of a fur hat and he is gone, the sound of the engine of his car roaring down the street. Now Sherlock is pacing round the flat, knocking stuff down as he goes, trying to block out John’s incessant patter following him wherever he goes. And his pleading.
“Sherlock, say something ---“
“And tell you what, exactly?” Sherlock turns and screams to his face so that John almost falls on his back. “That my mother raised me to be a good Catholic son, always do as she wanted and never doubt her or God? That in time the mere thought of her made me so ill that I secretly wished she would die? Because I couldn’t? Because I was so afraid of God that I believed he would punish me if I committed suicide? Believe me, I dreamt of that as well. The moments I didn’t spend thinking about my mother’s death, I searched for my own. I hoped that someone would do it for me, by accident so that God wouldn’t punish me. I got careless in traffic, I picked fights in alleys, I OD’d three times because I didn’t care how much or what kind of drugs I took at any one time!”
He is sure Mrs Hudson can hear him by now. He doesn’t care. She already knows.
“You want to hear that my mother didn’t love me and that I couldn’t go to her for anything, that everything, every little thing was my fault? That it was my fault they beat me up in school nearly every day because I knew more than they did? That I didn’t have any friends because everyone thought I was a freak? That when I go to her grave, I feel nothing! That’s what you want to hear?”
“Yes.”
Sherlock stands still, stares at John’s face, his blessedly, annoyingly calm face, full of understanding and comfort. Why the bloody comfort?
“I want to hear that. And everything else you have to throw at me. I’ll be there as much or as little as you like and I will take anything you have to give me.”
John’s voice hasn’t changed. It’s not shrill or loud. It’s low, calm, and meant to be comforting.
Sherlock feels ill.
“Sherlock…”
Turning on his heels, he stumbles to the bathroom and vomits up the few gulps of tea and the biscuit he had time to get into his system before Mycroft showed up and made all food and drink nauseating. The patter of John’s footsteps approaches him slowly as he retches and retches, breathes in deep, looks up to where John is standing silently above him and bursts into tears.
John is instantly on his knees, the drop muffled by the fluffy rug. Arms circle Sherlock who gulps in a lungful of air before he throws up again.
“You can’t keep doing this, Sherlock,” John’s lips press against his ear. “You never tell me anything about yourself. You pick out everything about me with a glance but when I try and talk to you about things that bother you, you shut me out.”
God, he wants to stop crying. But the tears just keep pouring out, wetting John’s shoulder, both their legs going numb on the cold tile floor. The whole bathroom is chilly now that they’ve turned the heating off everywhere else but the sitting room.
John rubs his back, presses on the visible bump of his spine under the dressing gown, before rising to his feet and stepping towards the door. Sherlock whimpers.
“I am not leaving,” John ensures him. “I am going to stay here, in my own home. And if you feel like you can’t stand my company, I will go upstairs. But no further.”
He walks away, along the hall, creak of springs, a rustle of paper and silence.
Sherlock breathes in, looking at the contents of the toilet. He stares at the few soggy bits of biscuits, imagines Mycroft’s face on all of them and flushes the toilet.
John sits on the sofa reading the newspaper, leg crossed over the other, covering his face with the paper.
Sherlock edges closer like a rabbit in headlights. It takes a few minutes for the soft tapping of his feet to register and John only acknowledges him when the bare toes come into view below his paper. Then he folds it in two and looks at him over it.
“Why are you so good to me?” Sherlock whispers.
“That’s what you think this is?”
“What else then?”
“Common decency?”
“No one’s ever shown that to me.”
“Their loss.”
John throws the paper on a pile of old ones on the floor and spreads his arms.
“Come here.”
Sherlock all but plunges in his lap. It is uncomfortable, cradling an oversized toddler in your arms, so John lowers them down on the sofa with a grunt, Sherlock whimpering unhappily for the moment it takes John to settle himself comfortably. Then he wraps his arms tighter round Sherlock, who sighs and buries his face in his chest.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Sherlock shakes his head.
“That’s fine. You don’t have to.”
He brushes Sherlock's hair away from his eyes.
“I want to help you. But you can’t keep shutting me out.”
+
As an apology for what happened, Mycroft sends them to Isle of Skye, all expenses covered. He has clearly been desperate to patch the damage he has caused, for it is equally clear that he has not thought things through, sending them to the Highlands in the middle of snowiest winter Britain has had in years.
Or he wants to bury them inside a cottage for the remainder of the winter.
Either or, they pack their bags, travel in first class from London to Glasgow and the rest of the journey on a bus to the island. The ferries are cancelled due to the weather which should be their first clue. But John forgets everything else when they arrive to the Blue Sea Cottage and Sherlock pounds to the floor length windows and presses his nose against the glass. The view is breathtaking as it is and Sherlock must be especially pleased to follow the approach of the grey storm clouds that promise more than enough snow and a limited access outside.
They wrap themselves up in blankets, sit on the floor on a sheep skin and watch the storm. At some point, John falls asleep but Sherlock keeps his eyes on the landscape disappearing quietly into a sea of white until dawn announces itself with a pitiful attempt of shining light through the clouds and mist that covers everything. Sherlock shakes John awake gently and they stumble in bed to continue to sleep for the few hours the light is still limited and the storm keeps on rumbling outside.
John is awakened at 11 by a snowball hitting the window. Peeking out, he sees Sherlock standing with his feet deep in the fresh snow, coat and hair white and cheeks glowing red. The window is stuck because of the snow but Sherlock mouths ‘I need you’ and throws another snowball before running off towards the front of the house.
Opening the front door, John is greeted by a freshly shovelled pathway from the house to the rented car and to the woodshed. He barely has time to admire Sherlock’s sudden understanding of practicalities when a large snowball hits him on the side of the head. He has time to see the flash of raven hair disappear around the corner and so he follows the pearls of laughter to the back of the house, picking up enough snow as he goes to drown Sherlock in it.
Sherlock is ready in fighting position, arms full of freshly made snowballs and cheeks bright red.
They throw every remainder of the aggression against the world into aiming and tossing and slipping and sweating and shivering and getting warm again. They fight until they are too exhausted to do anything but stumble inside, John draws them a bath and they climb in the clawfoot tub, sinking into the feeling of hot water and bath salts. John washes Sherlock’s hair, the water turning cool, suds of shampoo and bathwater floating round them like small islands.
Mycroft has only reserved the cottage for the weekend. Either he is his usual parsimonious self or he believes it will only take John two days to smooth the creases on Sherlock’s brow.
But they take everything out of the time they have. They sink into the comfortable silence they have grown accustomed to at Baker Street and now that the evident outburst of feelings has passed, they are happy to envelope themselves back into lack of words and plenitude of touches every time they happen to come close to one another.
Sherlock doesn’t mention his mother again and John thinks it’s fine. Maybe in the spring.
He coaxes Sherlock outside into the fresh snow early on Sunday morning and grabs an old sledge from the shed on their way to one of the steeper hills. Sherlock sits in the front and covers his eyes with his gloved hands and screams as they rush down the hill, a solitary rabbit staring at them from the edge of the forest. John’s sure hands guide them down and over the bumps that make Sherlock's screams shriller, with the years of experience of childhood winters and Harry screaming her head off in front of him John steers them safely down. He loves the adrenaline in his veins, he loves the source of it, he loves it when Sherlock turns round with a whiff and hugs him so that their bones grind against each other.
+
Their return flight is cancelled because of the snow, so they take the train. What should be five hours turns to ten because of the weather conditions and Sherlock sleeps through eight of it. John taps at his laptop, and when the battery dies he taps at his phone, and when that goes dark he takes Sherlock’s phone and keeps on tapping. Sherlock snores softly until they reach Carlisle where they have to slow down to half speed and then stop for almost an hour. Bleary eyed and tousled hair, Sherlock stares out of the window with his chin on the sill.
There is a sleek black car waiting for them at the station, empty except for the driver. John takes Sherlock’s hand and leads him to it. Like guiding the sledge round the most dangerous bumps, John leads Sherlock through the crowd.
Back at Baker Street, Mrs Hudson fusses and brushes snow from both of their clothes and tousles Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock kisses her on the cheek before trotting upstairs. John follows with the luggage, thinking fleetingly of the small lunch packs he prepared for them for the train ride and which are still half-full but decides to let it all keep until morning. They fall asleep in the sitting room, Sherlock still exhausted even after several hours of sleep, curled up on the sofa with five blankets. John sits snoring on the floor with his cheek resting against the sofa cushions, legs tugged under himself, one hand curled round Sherlock’s ankle.
He finds their snacks inside his bag in the morning and doesn’t stop to think but eats them, still half-asleep and starving.
+
Three weeks later it’s gotten even colder, even whiter, sunnier and all too bright for Sherlock to even stand to look outside.
“God I hate Valentine’s day!” he growls.
“I know,” John says to the crossword puzzle. “Me too.”
Sherlock glares at him from the sofa, dressing gown wrapped round him so tight he is trapped inside the blue silk and can’t move anything but his toes. John looks at him over the paper and folds it away.
”You want to have an anti-Valentine’s day-day?”
“That would mean acknowledging that Valentine’s day exists in the first place.”
“True. You want to have a Very Ordinary Day?”
“Yes, please.”
John gets up and stretches his arms over his head. His jumper hikes up and folds under his armpits. Sherlock stares at his stomach, covered only by a thin undershirt, having been used for so many years that it is almost see-through.
“You want a cup of perfectly ordinary tea and perhaps a plate of perfectly ordinary pancakes?” John asks, adjusting the jumper in place.
“I do.”
+
It has not snowed in weeks. The roads have stayed clear and people are again filling the streets, going in and out of shops, as does John who still does the shopping and cooking and washing up. It’s inhumanly cold though, he had almost decided against going when he had looked at the thermometre and how low the quicksilver had dropped. But Sherlock had whined from his very warm spot on his chair in front of the fire that he needed tea and lemons, both for an experiment.
So John returns with an extra pack of tea and an extra bag of lemons, dragging the bags making him sweat inside his quilted jacket and woollen jumper but his face is almost blue from the cold. He rings the doorbell instead of using the key because his fingers are frozen inside the thick mittens. Mrs Hudson tuts and clucks and brushes the snow off his trouser legs and boots before she allows him to step inside. All the while John stands with his arms hanging heavy with the weight of the shopping.
He climbs the stairs, listening to the ominous silence inside the flat.
Sherlock is not on the sofa where he left him. The sitting room is quiet, cooling down slowly with the fire dying down in the grate. Still the only thing different since John has left seems to be the lack of detective and a big black cloth over the table by the window.
John is fairly certain they never had a tablecloth. Impractical as it is, they never bothered to get one and just allow the pen marks, jackknife holes and food stains to decorate the table cover.
But now there is a dark black fabric (velvet, John twiddles it between his fingers) covering the sitting room table and both the chairs are standing next to each other in the corner.
So John crouches down and calls gently,
“Sherlock?”
A hum comes from under the cloth. John peeks in and guided by Sherlock’s impatient gesturing (though he can barely see the hands waving in the darkness but feels them on his face as they try to grasp his shoulders) crawls in and drops the cloth in place.
“What’s on, then?”
“Since I don’t have a dark room at my disposal, I decided the best thing would be to hide under here to see to my newest experiment.”
He waves towards the underside of the table, almost smacking John in the face in the dark. John glances up.
“Which is... drawing tiny dots and lines under our table?”
“They’re constellations, John.”
Oh. Yes they are. John recognises the Plough, his favourite, and is happy to note Sherlock has actually gone through the trouble of drawing the North Star above it bigger and brighter than the other stars.
Sherlock lies down on his back to admire his work. He moves his finger over the tiny spots and mutters to himself. After a while, he turns to look at John.
“I felt the urge to finally try and make glow-in-the-dark ink and I thought it appropriate that since I would be looking up to something in complete darkness, I should try my ink in drawing stars.”
He points at Orion’s belt.
“This is the first concoction which is why it is so dim and smells different. Didn’t work well.”
John’s eyes are now used to the dark and he sees the softness under him is actually his bed spread, littered with small bottles and different kind of pens. There are also two fluffy pillows (also from his bed) and Sherlock looks very comfortable resting his back on them with his right leg balanced over the left knee, foot tapping away in a slow rhythm.
“This is the second patch, the best one so far. I attempted to recreate it several times but I ran out of some ingredients in the middle so the third patch does glow but it loses its power after a while.”
Silence descents over the starlit sky under the table. John counts the stars, still surprised at the precision Sherlock has taken with each. The blanket spread on the floor is comfortable and warm. Without the stuffy feeling of same air being reused again and again by two people he could just imagine they are outside on a picnic, admiring the winter sky.
“Why constellations though, Sherlock? Why not just draw dots and pretend they were stars?”
Sherlock tugs the back of his shirt and he lays on his back, stealing one of the pillows from under Sherlock’s head. Imitating him, John lifts his leg over the other and bounces it up and down, fingers crossed over his chest.
He falls asleep at some point, head lolling on the pillow, mouth hanging open, breathing even and calm, dreaming the dreams of the hard-laboured and well-deserved. Sherlock keeps staring at the stars, counting them over and over until he as well falls asleep and wakes five hours later with the air under the table stuffy and overly warm.
+
Sherlock is cleaning his mind palace. He picks up one of John’s jumpers in the library, from on top of a blank copy of Bond (deleted the content, remembered the name) and folds it absent-mindedly, throws it on a pile of others to wait for when he has the time to find a better place for them. It’s a beautiful spring afternoon and the light is pouring in from every window, slight breeze making the dust particles dance. Everything is fresh and wanting to break free from their strains, to be reorganised and deleted, moved into a new room and locked away together with new things.
He finds another jumper, stored on one of the shelves securely behind marine navigation guides. This one is dark blue, worn from the elbows and Sherlock presses his nose into it, inhales deep, smells cleaning detergent and skin cells. It’s warm, he must have nicked it right after it came out from the dryer.
He perks his ears, listens to a quiet humming that has begun somewhere in the palace. John must be there, in another room somewhere, a song stuck in his head.
He patters through the halls slowly, listening to the hum coming closer, then retreating further, he backs up slightly, walks through a door into a cupboard full of paper hats made of old newspapers. There is a door hidden under the wallpaper, he pushes it open and walks out into a garden.
There is a fountain with little fish in it, a glass ceiling with bright sunlight streaming in and door after door circling the patch of grass he is standing on.
The hum gets louder.
He pushes one of the doors open and is in the sitting room of 221B, the light suddenly calmer, milder, like several layers of silk has been draped over the windows. John is sitting in his chair, paper in hand, humming and tapping his foot on the carpet. Sherlock goes to him, stands behind the chair until John looks up and smiles. He is slightly fuzzy round the edges and he doesn’t quite smell right.
It’s a pity this, how easy it is to see all the flaws and mistakes he has made with the John in the mind palace. This is a John, not the John, like a thumbprint, only a ghost of the original.
So he rewinds back out of the door, walks backwards through the garden, along the halls, into a bathroom with the water in the tub flowing over the sides and the tab still running, still running, through the door of the library and back where he started. He opens his eyes and sees John, real John, his John, sitting in his chair like he always is. Mrs Hudson is hoovering downstairs, the drone of the machine luckily drowned by several closed doors so that it is only a distant hum.
He is lying on the sofa, the spring sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, but real sunlight, warm and bright that makes every surface shine. He lies still, lets the sun warm his bare toes, listens to Mrs Hudson hoover, looks at John, looks and looks and looks.
“Would you spend the rest of your life with me?” he asks.
John shakes his wrist free from his cuff and takes an exaggerated look at his watch.
“Why not. I’m not in a rush.”
Sherlock lifts himself up from the sofa, stretches his arms behind his head and makes sure to give John a disapproving smack behind the head and pretend it’s an accident. Paying no attention to the huffing and puffing, he strolls to the window.
Baker Street is still white with snow but once again busy with traffic and pedestrians walking about and children having a snowball fight. Everything is happy, melting snow, chatter, sunshine, ordinary, cool, calm and peaceful.
Sherlock decides he likes it today. He looks at John over his shoulder.
“Two degrees Celsius.”
“Hmm,” John replies absently.